On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.
↫ Paul Kafasis
The downgraded icons listed in this article are just… Sad. While there’s no accounting for tastes, Apple’s new glassy icons are just plain bad, void of any whimsy, and lacking in artistry. Considering where Apple came from back when it made beautifully crafted icons that set the bar for the entire industry.
Almost seems like a metaphor for tech in general.
Sticking to Sequoia / v15 for as long as I can…
I think It’s safe to say this release is a step backwards [* pointing at liquid glass *].
As taunting as a “squircle of lemon” (hope you got that reference)
I find that tech companies insisting on exerting control over the Operating Systems of their customers to this extent, by disallowing theming, for example, is a sad step backward. Even Gnome is guilty of this.
Theming and drawing of on-screen elements should be open and public for every OS GUI out there. Be it a JSON or a stupid XML, make the specificiation open so anyone can decide how things are.
And app developers are also guilty of the mess. Every single application UI/UX developer believes that they know UI better and you end up having a cacophony of different application themes everywhere – in Linux, you kinda understand, you have gnone apps, kde apps, etc.. But Windows devs? Everything should look like a windows app.
Go boot nextstep 3.3 – it’s a breath of fresh air. All applications are easy to discover because they follow the standard paradigms.
OK. So until Gnome developers explained their reasons for not allowing theming, I was all in favor of theming. I like being able to customize how things look and behave. But in practice, theming means that:
* Accessibility measures become more complicated and in some cases unimplementable.
* Bug fixes and QC/Testing becomes significantly more complicated; it’s often hard to tell whether bugs belong to a toolkit or a theme engine.
* Themes themselves do not undergo rigorous testing or have well-articulated QC standards, and so bugs about e.g. missing icons get misdirected to application developers. They are also often downloaded and installed from sources whose security practices look different from those of e.g. a linux distro.
* Documentation becomes more difficult to produce, since e.g. screenshots of an application may look very different from how the application itself looks to users.
There are others. But I’m convinced that theming is on one hand an issue of user freedom and, on the other a more complicated issue of the degree to which users may dictate how developers, package maintainers, etc. spend their time.
Best user interface is terminal. Fast, lightweight, lookalike everywhere.
https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis